Boo! Those pesky kids and their going to the bar all the time! Why, I ought to do something about it. I ought to complain about it to the East Lansing City Council.
This might have been what was running through East Lansing resident Harry Moxley's head when he decided to give his opinion about why the April 2-3 disturbances took place. Moxley, who is the vice chairman of the Bailey Community Association, is blaming the high concentration of bars in East Lansing's downtown for what followed the MSU men's basketball team's Final Four loss against North Carolina.
Moxley, a 1990 MSU graduate, apparently is unaware of the meaning of "downtown." Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines it as "the lower part of a city," "the main business district." You know, like one convenient place where you can do things like, say, go out to dinner or to the bar. The council shouldn't have to disperse liquor licenses into different parts of the city, as Moxley, and apparently residents he says agree with him, are proposing.
Moxley said it's "a real failure on the part of the council to face up to the fact that they've allowed the businesses down (town) there to run amok serving alcohol." But of those 15 businesses with liquor licenses clustered in the downtown area, a significant portion are restaurants such as India Palace and Cosi - not spots where students are getting hammered.
If Moxley really wants to find where people are drinking, he might want to begin on the street he lives on. According to Joe Goodsir, the director of the Responsible Hospitality Council and co-owner of Rick's American Café, only about 20 percent of the alcohol sold in East Lansing is being served in bars and restaurants. The remaining hooch comes from party and grocery stores.
Furthermore, liquor-license violations in downtown East Lansing's bars have been declining and no violations were issued for the April 2-3 disturbances.
If you ever want to see a good example of how a city's bars should be run, East Lansing is a prime example. The creation of the Responsible Hospitality Council in 1998 linked together many liquor-serving establishments in East Lansing in order to keep customers safe and promote responsible drinking.
In prior years, the group has worked to establish drinking rules, ways to handle bar crawls and 21st birthday celebrations. They are quite far from running "amok" - a word Merriam-Webster uses to define a murderous frenzy, Mr. Moxley.
At any rate, the main action of the disturbance didn't even occur downtown. While 1,500 people gathered there, about twice that number met with the cops in Cedar Village.
The right of free speech is honored for people like Mr. Moxley, but what they're really doing is helping let the real bad guys - the cops - escape accounting for their unnecessary actions.
If you were out in that melee, consider what you saw a little harder. East Lansing has an excellent bar scene, what it doesn't have is police officers who know how to handle the people in it.
